As the university begins to question the utility of DEI, some on campus may cling to it. They should be ignored.
The tide appears to be turning against the DEI bureaucracy, but faculty, staff, and students won’t acquiesce easily
D espite the University of Michigan football team’s recent success, the football team isn’t as newsworthy as the institution’s Office of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion. The university has 241 employees in DEI-related positions and has spent over $250 million on DEI since 2016, making it the largest DEI bureaucracy in higher education. The costs of such an operation have been high, but the benefits have been unclear. Luckily, university administrations are now rethinking their prior decisions that have allowed for the growth of the DEI bureaucracy.
Michigan students like me periodically receive an email from Vice Provost and Chief Diversity Officer Tabbye M. Chavous regarding DEI on campus. The university is currently pursuing a “strategic plan [that] represents the University of Michigan’s continued commitment to ensuring a diverse, equitable and inclusive community with even more sharply defined goals, new innovations and investments, and enhanced measures of accountability.” Email updates sent to the study body about the initiative are largely ignored. After all, we already have piles of homework to do, club activities to attend, and football games to watch. No student has time to follow the progress of DEI on campus, which results in massive student apathy towards the issue. Many students don’t realize how many university resources are wasted on such an ethically questionable ideology.
But DEI does more than clutter students’ email inboxes; it is deeply ingrained in the surroundings of campus life. There are at least 16 multicultural lounges on campus that are meant to “serve as safe havens for students to engage with, celebrate, and learn about various cultures and identities.” The College of Literature, Science, and the Arts at the University requires its students to take a three-credit course that addresses “issues arising from racial or ethnic intolerance.” Michigan Dining, which manages the dining halls on campus, boasts how “Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion is both a core value and an aspect of everything we do.” The Trotter Multicultural Center, a building in which students have classes, seeks to “provide intentional space for community engagement that promotes intercultural and multicultural engagement, racial healing, and transformative development across all generations and cultures.”
Why has DEI become omnipresent on campus? Is this really necessary? Are all these DEI programs working to their intended effect?
Nicholas Confessore addressed some of these questions in his extensive investigation of DEI at the University of Michigan. His investigation displays the discontent that surrounds Michigan’s DEI apparatus. University faculty are “worried that Michigan’s press to ingrain D.E.I. into their scholarship . . . had narrowed its departments rather than broadening them.” It appears that university administrators are hearing the faculty’s complaints. So far, the university has chosen to eliminate diversity statements as part of faculty hiring, promotion, and tenure decisions. Furthermore, reports are circulating that the regents are considering budget cuts to the DEI apparatus.
The tide appears to be turning against the DEI bureaucracy, but faculty, staff, and students won’t acquiesce easily. In a letter that is now public, the faculty senate chairwoman Rebekah Modrak warned faculty of the regents’ intention to cut DEI programming, and she encouraged faculty members to demonstrate their support for the university’s “core values of diversity, equity, and inclusion.” Earlier this month, about a hundred students and faculty members marched in support of diversity, equity, and inclusion. Students from the Black Student Union want the university to go further in their DEI efforts, citing failures to raise black student enrollment.
No matter the course of action taken by the regents, quarreling among administrators, faculty, and students is inevitable. Unfortunately, the upcoming semester is bound to be filled with much attention towards the fate of DEI at the university, drawing the attention of the university away from the advancement of knowledge. Let’s hope the administrators can refocus the university’s commitment to promoting the “Leaders and Best,” and put an end to the DEI distraction.